Our attempts to become rampant capitalists slum lords seem to be on
hold for the moment. For most of the last month we have been
negotiating with the owners of the neighbouring house to try and buy
it. It looked like everything was getting close two weeks ago, we had
hit pretty much our maximum price, but they were slowly coming down
and the difference was basically trivial. Then they cancelled a
meeting and went to Australia for a week. A few days ago they came
back, with a higher price of course, and suggested a meeting last
night to talk about it. In the interim we had a chance to reconsider
things and it just didn’t look like good value any more, so we dropped
our price down to the valuation we had. In other words we removed the
sweetener we had added to try and get the deal done quickly – it
clearly hadn’t worked. Naturally they weren’t happy. We have left them
with our offer, if they can’t find anything better maybe they will
come back, but the house isn’t that important to us.
On top of this, a mutual neighbour of both properties is pushing us
to buy the property and offering us a bit of cash to help – on the
condition he can run a driveway through to his place. We aren’t going
to play that sort of game. I suspect this isn’t the end of the saga,
but it should be quite for the next few weeks at least.